Friday, April 15, 2016

Fragment from: Ward, William Hayes. What I Believe and Why. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915.

I think my first unrecognized doubt as to the historical certitude of the Bible came in the three years between the ages of six and nine, during which my father required me to read the Bible through in Hebrew, he being my teacher. He believed, I am glad to say, that Hebrew was an easier language to learn than Greek or Latin, and with three years for each, and in this reverse order, he required me to read the whole Bible in the original tongues, with the Old Testament also in Greek, and the New in Hebrew, and both in Latin. It was during those years given to Hebrew that I learned from my Gesenius's "Lexicon" that Babel in Arabic means the gate of God, Bab-Il, and not confusion as the Genesis story tells us...

Thursday, April 14, 2016

Fragment from: Fairclough, Henry Rushton. Warming Both Hands: The Autobiography of Henry Rushton Fairclough Including His Experiences under the American Red Cross in Switzerland and Montenegro. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1941.

It was a good many years after our first meeting that I had the honor of appearing on the same platform with Dr. Breasted. This was in St. Louis in 1916, on the occasion of the annual banquet of the Archaeological Institute of America. Chicago's great Hellenist, Paul Shorey, had returned from California, and on his way East had prepared for this event an address on "The Loneliness of the Scholar." The tone was distinctly morbid, but we auditors were hardly prepared for the heat shown by Dr. Breasted, who as next speaker denounced his colleague's views with all the fire of a Hebrew prophet. "I suppose," he said, "that there are not half a dozen men in this country working along the same lines as I do. But am I lonely? Not a bit of it. If I can dig out a scrap of fresh knowledge to give to the school-children of America, I am as happy as a king."

The History of the Study of Antiquity through the Lens of Autobiography Blog

This blog is a component of a research project initiated by Charles E. Jones, Tombros Librarian for Classics and Humanities, Pennsylvania State University Libraries, who has a long standing interest in the history of the study of the Ancient Near East and Egypt, and of old world Antiquity more generally. This blog will present the working bibliography of the project, and provide a platform for comment and discussion of autobiographical writing by students and scholars of the ancient world.

I hope also to develop a venue for the publication of new autobiographical essays in the form of an online open access periodical.